Re-imagining Dudley High Street
We are a social lab that lives on Dudley High Street. Not the shiny, cleaned up, well lit, new street furniture, new market end of the High Street. The end with boarded up shop fronts; the end where the street furniture and shop frontages are falling into disrepair; the end where traffic congestion & cars dominate the space often resulting in a toxic car fumes fug and stressful interactions.
In our time spent listening to and creating with doers in our local community over the last 2 years this part of the High Street has been repeatedly framed within a narrative of decay. For many of our doers the High Street is indicative of Dudley more broadly, as a declining Midlands town scarred by post-industrialisation, and hurting badly from over a decade of severely reduced public services.
Loss of shared spaces of connection
Important social infrastructure — like public museums, public art galleries, cinemas, post offices, creative community hubs, or libraries — that act as important everyday spaces of connection, welcome, support and creative nourishment are closed or reducing their opening hours. The decline and decay of our public spaces — our streets and parks included — erodes a social infrastructure urgently needed in response to major challenges of growing segregation and isolation.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds us of the importance of social infrastructure in fighting inequality, polarisation and the decline of civic life. In Palaces for the People he talks of the everyday physical conditions and context needed for people to develop often life-saving connections and friendships. He argues that when our social infrastructure is robust “it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration” and “when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves”. Places where people gather, linger, create together and make friends across group lines strengthen our communities.
Currently our High Streets are largely failing to be these places of connection.
“With the loss of this space; we mourn the loss of human interaction … If we want a society where we can build relationships, integrate, understand and share we have to fight for spaces where those interactions can take place.”
Like many towns in the UK, this picture of decline in Dudley is compounded by shifting shopping habits as people have been diverted to an out of town shopping centre, or online to do their shopping. This once bustling High Street, that featured as the essential canvas of the weekly family trip into Dudley centre, where you exchanged smiles and greetings with friends and strangers, has been eviscerated.
Sense of place
This decline has implications for our sense of place (including our place attachment) that in turn impacts upon the assumptions and judgements we make in our day to day interactions on the High Street. It also shapes how and what we might imagine is the future of this place. “Sense of place is the lens through which people experience and make meaning of their experiences in and with place” The High Street sense of place — once shaped around a busy market town and proud capital of a region of manufacturing & innovation — has been hollowed out. Many times, from many local doers, we have listened to a story of a High Street described as sad, unsafe, a shadow of its former self, and now without purpose.
Through the research with local people and our systems sensing work we have realised the social cost of this decline is demonstrably linked to a real deficit of social connection and civic agency. The High Street no longer successfully fulfils its civic role of creating welcoming, safe and happenchance zones of connection and interaction for local people.
Julian Agyeman argues the urgent need to design intercultural inclusive spaces to enable diverse urban communities such as ours to thrive, build relationships, create and innovate. These are the spaces where friends and strangers from a range of backgrounds can meet, share ideas/ stories and build connections, relationships and collaborations. Without them, exclusions are reinforced and isolation erodes our resilience — both individual and collective. Meanwhile across the globe cities are recognising our public spaces (our civic commons) are integral to our social infrastructure and they need reimagining in a way that is inclusive, equitable and inspires sharing, friendships, care & stewardship.
A new spatial imaginary
Yet there is hope. More than that — there are people willing to make change happen.
For example, Gather Dudley CIC and its situation on Dudley High Street is articulated by participants as a story of contrast with the surrounding urban decay and absence of other creative and inclusive spaces for building connections through doing:
“It is like having a light, or a wall with a piece of art on it, it is a presence both in the physical sense and spiritual sense, in whatever way people acknowledge that, there is a thing about beauty, there is a thing that stirs the soul, so having that on a High Street that has faced huge austerity, in an area of high poverty and depression, it is goodness on the street.” [Detectorism Insights 1 research participant, 2017]
Through our open to all collective doing, making and sharing together we have also witnessed an aspiration for and emergence of an alternative spatial imaginary for the High Street.
A spatial imaginary is:
“a shared or collective understanding of a particular space produced in association with the practices of living in that space. Importantly, spatial imaginaries are more than ‘just’ cognitive frameworks / representations; they structure and co-constitute social practices and have material effects.” (Nerlich and Morris, 2015)
There is a growing articulation to collectively redesign Dudley High Street. This future spatial imaginary is rooted in a desire for social justice, collective agency and a reanimated sense of place and belonging. It is underpinned by the everyday creative power and talents of local people. This reimagining is mindful of the town’s history, but also seeks to re-weave a more regenerative connection with nature into that story …
After a period of listening and testing of experiments that invite sharing, connection & creativity, we have forged our lab goals around this new emboldened relationship with place.
We believe that authentic people led change is made possible through democratising doing, making and (re)designing the spaces around us.
This means re-purposing or revealing the latent assets and skills that get thrown away, forgotten or go unrecognised. It means forging deeper relationships so that as a collective we can work together to re-imagine the High Street, its’ identity and its’ purpose.
We know the top down masterplans that rely upon the rational economic-man / consumer citizen model are unsustainable on many levels. We know from thought leaders like Kate Raworth that instead we must employ a 21st Century economics that takes better account (and care!) of our collective and intergenerational social and planetary needs.
As Julian Dobson argues here:
“this involves rethinking how space is used, who has access to it and owns it, and where the economic, social and environmental benefits flow”.
Part of this demands a shift away from over-consumption and means the High Street must revisit a more diverse and all-together more civic range of functions. In his article on the need to shift ‘from me towns to we towns’ Julian Dobson provides this valuable history lesson about the role of the High Street almost as a type of social infrastructure:
“By framing town centres largely as retail destinations, I argue policymakers and academics … have bypassed vital aspects of what makes a town function as a town: the intersection of human life and activity in locations where exchange encompasses ideas, beliefs, civic engagement, public welfare and a spectrum of non-retail business activities.”
Many ideas. Many hands. Many Experiments.
As a social lab and creative/participatory platform our job is to help nurture the emergence of a more creative, connected and resilient social infrastructure & social capital in the town centre.
We know this will involve many ideas, many hands, and many experiments. But as Dan Gregory describes here this is all about enabling social relationships to be forged, building places that foster togetherness, and platforms for cooperation:
“Social action, social enterprise and social innovation cannot flow of their own accord: they rely upon social infrastructure. This is the long-term asset that supports social action, volunteering, co-operation and social enterprise. Social infrastructure ‘refers to the range of activities, organisations and facilities supporting the formation, development and maintenance of social relationships in a community. These are the places and structures and buildings or clubs that enable people to get together, meet, socialise, volunteer and co-operate. Social action and social enterprise is made possible by this underlying social infrastructure. This is not what happens — it’s the stuff that supports stuff to happen. So what exactly is this civic operating system upon which our society is run? Where are these places that foster togetherness? What are these places of assembly? Where are our platforms for co-operation?
Our particular social infrastructure focus is upon the emergence of spaces, moments and ways of thinking & doing that create
- a range of linked creative spaces across the town centre for doing & making social initiatives
- spaces & reasons for interaction & connection amongst strangers to begin to build networks of support
- a town wide culture of curiosity
- a shift for the local community in their relationship with public spaces — how they are used, viewed, owned, experienced — as creative, connecting, collective, joyful, theirs to own, shape & steward
How these goals manifest and evolve will be determined by the local people that shape, develop and animate them. Our job is to invite people to take part, to make it easy to take part & collaborate, to make people welcome and affirm their agency, share inspiration from around the world, connect people, ideas and resources in the growing network of support, convene with purpose, and share the collective learning this change illuminates.
For example, in recent months we have convened with purpose to build a collective of doers, makers and creatives that will begin to animate these goals. Together we are taking our doing and creating outside onto the High Street through a series of street experiments including Paint Dudley and Do Fest (our festival of doing in 18–20 July).
#paintdudley is a collaboration with local Black Country creatives and doers to brighten up the town. It is all free to take part and invites us to pay close attention to beauty, stories and meaning in the everyday fabric of the town through photowalks, pop-up exhibitions and sign writing workshops.
This flexing of curiosity, creative talents and mindsets invites a new relationship with the place. They encourage creative and mindful behaviours otherwise missing on a tired and sad part of the High Street. They bring together like-minded creatives, makers and doers to share ideas, talents and stories.
DO FEST 2019 is a 3 day festival of fun and street experiments on Dudley High Street. A collective of passionate doers and creatives are coming together to create a kinder and more creative High Street. We were really intentional in designing the festival in a way that suspends the usual social norms of the High Street and instead invites and models collaboration, connection, curiosity, and joy. You can read about some of the shared thinking that went into that in our festival detectorism blog here.
These street experiments invite a different spatial imaginary for the High Street from the sad story of decline, disconnect and isolation that it currently embodies. This new imaginary encourages different behaviours, agency and representations. In this imaginary the High Street will be:
- a place for connection and care
- a space of creativity and joy
- a space of curiosity and experimentation
- a space to share and build memories of making and doing together
- a space to shape and belong to
Sounds like a lovely place doesn’t it?! Fancy joining in?
As part of this re-imagining the CoLab Dudley team and growing collective of creatives, doers and makers are excited about the potential to contribute to the development of the St Thomas’s Quarter (the part of Dudley Town Centre including and surrounding the High Street). We’ve been talking to the council about their plans as they explore how they too can help bring the quarter to life.
So come and be part of the change we all want to see and can create together on the High Street.
It will take many ideas, many hands & many experiments.
